Travel Commands keeps docked ships, well, docked.

[Snek]

Bad with formatting/text but here it goes: it would be cool if you could order a ship to travel with ships docked to it, and it would not have to undock them. You can already do it with the regular jump, or jump gates, i don't see a gameplay reason why the map commands shouldn't.

[Mechanisto]

You can already do this with claimed asteroids to move them between sectors, so we know it's possible to program it into the game. I wonder if you can also do this with player-built stations...?

There is one balance factor to consider: It would allow you to give travel commands to ships that do not have captains. This is significant, since ships without captains can fight to defend you: You could tow a half-dozen ships into a sector, manually give them all escort commands, and then start a huge battle.

Personally, I think the idea of a "warp tugboat" would be awesome. If it's imbalanced, maybe require that both ships have captains. In that case, it would be mostly a QoL change: It saves you from having to add a large hyperspace core or rare warp module to a bunch of smaller ships.

Edited November 25, 2021 by Mechanisto

[Snek]

Yeah, to make it balanced, all I would do is make it only ships with captains can undock, otherwise you have to do it yourself.

[Hillenmane]

On 11/25/2021 at 2:08 AM, Mechanisto said:

Personally, I think the idea of a "warp tugboat" would be awesome. If it's imbalanced, maybe require that both ships have captains. In that case, it would be mostly a QoL change: It saves you from having to add a large hyperspace core or rare warp module to a bunch of smaller ships.

I actually did this for a while pre-2.0 with a Battlecruiser I built. It was annoying to steer it through asteroid fields and I hated batting rocks all over the place, so I was exploring with a docked escort vessel equipped with hacking subsystems, and a docked mining carrier.

I would really like the ability to move my ships in that configuration because I started building ships with that in mind. If your battlecruiser is too big to go claim an asteroid you need a smaller craft, and just using the drone is kinda lame.